Aspen (Colorado): Physicists working at CERN's Large Hadron Collider said today that they had discovered a new particle that looks for all the world like the Higgs boson, a long sought particle that is a key to understanding why elementary particles have mass and indeed to the existence of diversity and life in the universe.

"I think we have it," said Rolf Heuer, the Director General of CERN in an interview from his office outside of Geneva. His words signaled what is probably the beginning of the end of the longest most expensive manhunt in the history of science and, if scientists are lucky, could lead to a new understanding of how the universe began. 

Dr Heuer and others said that it was too soon to know for sure whether the new particle, which weighs in at 125 billion electron volts, the heaviest subatomic particle yet, fits the simplest description given by the Standard Model, the theory that has ruled physics for the last half century, or whether it is an imposter, a single particle or even the first of many. The latter possibilities are particularly exciting to physicists since they could point the way to new deeper ideas, beyond the Standard Model, about the nature of reality.